Data-Driven Documents: RMarkdown
R Workshop
Introduction
A great feature of RStudio is that you can create data-driven documents. That is, documents that use combine text and analysis into a “reproducible” documents. This is done using R Markdown. In other words, it allows you to write all of the text, syntax for the analysis, etc. and keep it in a document. This way you are not bouncing between programs and everything is reproducible. This is ideal if you are using a publicly available data set.
Getting Started
First, you need to install the rmarkdown package
using:
Now, let’s take a look at how it works. Open a new R Markdown file using the drop-down menu as shown below:
Then, use the options to pick the type of file you want to create.
Afterwards, click on the knit function in the .Rmd pane:
You did it!
Next Steps
Easy enough right? Great! That was a simple example, there is a lot more you can do. If you are ready to charge forward, then here are some helpful links:
Get inspired by looking through the R Markdown gallery.
Walk through the R Markdown lessons in the R Studio website.
Some Examples
Take a look at the RWorkshop github page. Click on the topics folder.
You will see a .Rmd file for all of the sections we
covered today. Let’s look through a few.
Here is another example. Take a look through the R2PhX pages. In particular, take a look at this page examining crime in Phoenix. This page is a .html file that is created using an RMarkdown file. That file can be found here.